The beginning of this movie reminds us of Blue Velvet. It's set in a rual village called Berkeley. Peaceful, pastoral, and full of nice and kind people. Suddenly, stones falling from the sky start to attack people and turn the whole village into a living hell: whoever gets hit by a stone turns into a zombie. Rene, a beauty pageant winner, teams up with 5 other people including an eccentric middle-aged man named Marion, the local police and a couple, trying to set the situation right. This unique work of a film from Australia starts as a bloody gorefest/comedy but slowly turns into something of a mystery along the lines of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the TV series The X-files. The first half is actually a scaled-up homage to Night of the Living Dead by George Romero, which of course is the father of all subsequent Zombie movies. This kind of setup could feel quite obvious to those genre maniacs, but what makes this rehashed setup fresh and interesting is the character of Marion. This middle aged man-who spends his days fishing in the river - turns out of be a daredevil who doesn't even blink at the sight of attacking zombies; a typical impossible hero we've seen so much in Hong Kong noir, Martial arts films, and American westerns. Despite the intense hard-gore explicitness of flying heads, broken spines, and bodies spilt in half, the funny character of Marion allows the audience to absorb these impossible situations without too much disgust, and to be able laugh at jokes thrown in here and there. Through the last half, Rene, the heroine, gradually grows up as a character, which intensifies the mysterious sci-fi quality of the film. The director's imagination shown in this development is also fresh and ingenious. As a whole, this film shows a great influence from Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, and fans of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead will surely enjoy this odd little film. (LIM Ji-soo)